Podcast episodes I enjoyed in November - Alex Salmond, Miriam Margolyes on Charles Dickens, The Labour Party, Brief Encounter, Bob Marley in Dublin, , Druids, Santa, King Arthur, JG Ballard, Marx, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and Shirley Ballas on Nirvana

These are the podcast episodes that I particularly enjoyed last month.

Episodes I’ve enjoyed previously are on the podcast pages for this year, for 2024, 2023, and for 2022

The Hated and the Dead - Alex Salmond (recorded and released before his death) - according to polling evidence, one of the significant factors leading people to vote ‘No’ in the independence referendum was concern about pensions

Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - The REAL Charles Dickens with Miriam Margolyes - some time around the end of the 1980s I heard Margolyes talking about Dickens in a bookshop off the Strand. It maybe didnt exactly chnage my life, but it did change my reading. I enjoy Margolyes on chat shows and the like, but she’s really, really good talking about Charles Dickens

Origin Story: The Labour Party – Part One – A Very British Socialism - Labour have had four leaders with the first name ‘James’. James Kier Hardie, James Ramsey MacDonald, James Harold Wilson, James Gordon Brown…but not Leonard James Callaghan.

Archive on 4 - Brief Encounter - Celia Johnson wanted to keep some of the clothes from the film. Not because she liked them, but because there was a war on, and clothing was rationed

The Rest is Entertainment - Is Social Media Dead? - I didnt know that Gwen Stefani’s “The Hollerback Girl” was about Courtney Love

Stuart Mitchell’s Cost of Living - Im not entirely sure this is the right episode, but the one i heard was very funny. Apparently Louis Vuitton bags need arent the most hard-wearing

Bob Marley In The Park - RTE Doc on One - Bob Marley’s only ever show in Ireland was at Dalymount Park, the home of Bohemians F.C. At the licensing hearing the judge asked whether the band would be “beating out their music on beer cans”

Desert Island Discs - Shirley Ballas - “‘Smells like teen spirit’ is a great paso doble”

Druids: everything you wanted to know History Extra podcast - Ronald Hutton says that there is some evidence that Julius Caesar’s account of the Druids of Britain, which is the most detailed description of them, was written by someone else

The Rest is Entertainment - Is Taylor Swift punching down? - i enjoyed Richard Osman referring to Max Martin as a “great unsung songwriter”

Iain Dale All Talk: 337. Sophy Ridge

Origin Story: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin – Part Two – Power - Churchill said this of Lenin ”The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth: their next worst - his death"

Origin Story: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin – Part One – Revolution - I think one of the guys on the podcast says that Lenin and Trotsky are the “Ross and Rachel of Marxism”. Despite that (unlike virtually everything else on these pages this is a subject i did once study a bit), this is a really good discussion of the big guns of Soviet communism

Saint Nicholas - Dan Snow’s History Hit | Acast - ‘Santa Claus’ is listed as one of the attendees at the Council of Nicaea in AD 325, at which the Church established the orthodoxy that Jesus was divine. Legend has it that he slapped Arius, the main proponent of the Arian view that Jesus was human

King Arthur’s Sex Life Betwixt The Sheets: The History Of Sex, Scandal & Society podcast - I think Eleanor Janega says that the Victorians thought it unlucky to be married in May. Tennyson has Arthur and Guiniver marrying then.

BBC Radio 4 - Great Lives, John Gray on JG Ballard - Ballard’s daughter, Bea, says she only realized how significant her father was when she read about him in the NME

BBC Sounds - Short History Of…, The Salem Witch Trials - the Salem witch trials happened as witch-hunting was dying out in Europe. This is a grim listen.

A Short History of…..Pearl Harbour - the Japanese air force planes were spotted on radar before the attack on Pearl Harbour, but it was first dismissed as a glitch in the system, and then as a group of B-17s being relocated from San Francisco

Episode 167 : Barbara Ellen on the NME + Madonna + Spinal Tap - I read Barbara Ellen’s column in the Observer for many years, and then realised recently that i think i knew her, very slightly. Odd to think she was going to the pub with a bunch of computing nerds at around the same time that she interviewed Madonna. Also features an chat with Spinal Tap, in character, which includes the bombshell that “Stonehenge was an amplifier”

Origin Story: Karl Marx – Part Two – The Father - Marx was called ‘the Moor’ by his family and friends because of his dark complexion

The Secrets Of Tipping Point–The Rest Is Entertainment - the discs on tipping point look and sound metallic, but they are plastic. Metallic-sounding sound effects are added on afterwards

Mark Steel’s in town - Lewisham - Desmond Tutu used to live in Brownhill Road, Catford